You, Michael, always said that it was immoral to invest thousands of shekels in a bathroom. What does a bathroom need except running water, you’d say, adding another two-word phrase (in your verdicts, you also liked to use two-word phrases to express loathing): Outrageous waste. Pure ostentation. Revolting hedonism. After showering in Avner Ashdot’s computerized bathroom, I want to add to the list, if you will permit me, another two-word phrase: pure pleasure. Buttons that regulate heat, cold, and water pressure in such a way that you can adjust them exactly, not approximately, to what you want. A steam hood that keeps too much steam from accumulating. Shelves overflowing with the best toiletries, including bath oils and natural soaps. Scented candles. Buttons you press that change the color of the water by activating underwater colored lighting. Velvety soft towels. I know that you couldn’t care less about all of this. It’s clear to me that you consider these technical specifications irrelevant. But I really want you to understand, Michael, not only how much I enjoyed that shower—so much that I forgot I was supposed to step out of it at some point—but also why, for days after it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it with longing. Actually yearning for it.

Inspired by Frank Ostaseski in his book titled The Five Invitations where he shares five habits of mind, orientations of spirit — through which an untruculent acceptance of death can become a love-expanding, life-expanding force: (1) Don’t wait. (2) Welcome everything, push away nothing. (3) Bring your whole self to the experience. (4) Find a place of rest in the middle of things. (5) Cultivate don’t know mind. In the remainder of The Five Invitations, Ostaseski delves deeper into each of these precepts to distill its vital lifeblood into insights and practices with which to enrich and ennoble our diurnal existence. (Source: Brain Pickings)

…Take a shower, wash off the day.
Drink a glass of water.
Make the room dark.
Lie down and close your eyes.
Notice the silence.
Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting.
You made it, after all. You made it, another day.
And you can make it one more.
You’re doing just fine.I’m doing just fine.

I wish the whole day were like breakfast, when people are still connected to their dreams, focused inward, and not yet ready to engage with the world around them. I realized this is how I am all day; for me, unlike other people, there doesn’t come a moment after a cup of coffee or a shower or whatever when I suddenly feel alive and awake and connected to the world. If it were always breakfast, I would be fine.”